This is an Worldwide Guide!

Do you live in the USA?

Do you live outside of the USA?

Prices for B&H and Newegg as of December 9th 2016. Put your mouse on Amazon links or click on them to see prices.

Hard Drive Failure Rates: Which brand is the most reliable?

How do I know which hard drive is more reliable than another?

From Marc Prieur, of hardware.fr, here are the hard drives failures rates according to a French e-tailer as of December 2016:
– Seagate 0.72%
– Toshiba 0.80%
– Western Digital 1.04%
– HGST 1.13%

The failure rates are based on parts sold between October 1st 2015 and April 1st 2016, for returns before October 2016, which represents 6 months to one year of usage. The statistics per brand are based on a sample of at least 500 sales.

The Backblaze hard drive reliability statistics article is also worth a look. While their setups aren’t similar to the typical computer, as they use proprietary Storage Pod enclosures, which contains as many as 60 3.5″ drives in four units of rack space, it’s still one excellent resource available with real-world data on hard drive reliability.

Although these numbers don’t paint the complete picture of world wide failure rates, they are still an interesting sample to look at.

The Best 3.5″ Desktop Hard Disk Drives (HDD):

Highest performance hard drives:

7200rpm hybrid hard drives

Hybrid Hard Drive? (Also known as ‘Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD)’ )

It combines a hard drive with a flash memory chip, similar to the ones used in SSDs.

This boost performance versus a traditional hard drive by caching the most frequently used files, so that when there are requests for those files, they are read from the much higher performance flash memory instead of being read from the disk.

This is all done automatically, you have nothing to do to gain the additional performance, but it also means that you have no control over it.

It also means that when the required file(s) isn’t in the cache, it is read from the hard drive, with the lower performance of a 7,200rpm hard drive.

Overall, you get faster boot times and faster program/game launch for the applications that you use often.

All of this at a very reasonable price when compared to the price of a comparably sized SSD or a small SSD + HDD combo. It’s also much simpler to use compared to managing a small SSD and a HDD.

That said, if you want far higher performance, for editing audio, photo or video, loading Windows, games, applications far faster or loading heavy files, a SSD is the way to go.

I recommend two hybrid hard drives: A 1TB model and a 2TB model.

Stay away from the Seagate 4TB hybrid hard drive, it spins at a slower 5,900rpm speed, resulting in lower performance.
Same goes for the WD 4TB WD40E31X, it spins at an even slower 5,400rpm.

The Best Data Center 3.5″ hard disk drives (HDD)

High performance 7200rpm, 128MB cache, 5 years warranty, rated for a 550 TB workload per year, up to 2.5 M hours MTBF and highly reliable, the WD Gold line-up currently co-exists with the WD Re line-up and will eventually replace it.

Being data center-oriented HDDs, the WD Gold hard drives are optimized for RAID environments and they support enhanced RAFF technology that protects against vibration (by monitoring linear and rotational vibration in real time) as well as head positioning system with two actuators, which improves positional accuracy. The drives also support WD’s time-limited error recovery technology (TLER), which prevents drive fallout caused by extended HDD error recovery processes.

The Best 2.5″ Laptop Hard Disk Drives (HDD):

Compatibility warning:Make sure to double-check which height of hard drives your laptop supports: 9.5mm are the most common, but some are limited to drives with a 7mm height.

High performance: Hybrid 2.5″ Hard Drive

Hybrid Hard Drive?
Also known as ‘Solid State Hybrid Drive (SSHD)’. It combines a 500GB or 1TB hard drive with a 8GB flash memory chip, similar to the ones used on SSDs. There’s also a model with a 1TB hard drive with 32GB flash memory, for an additional 25% performance boost compared to the model with 8GB of flash memory.

This boost performance versus a traditional hard drive by caching the most frequently used files, so that when there are requests for those files, they are read from the much higher performance flash memory instead of being read from the disk.

This is all done automatically, you have nothing to do to gain the additional performance, but it also means that you have no control over it.

It also means that when the required file(s) isn’t in the cache, it is read from the hard drive, with the far lower performance of a 5400rpm hard drive.

Overall, you get faster boot times and faster program/game launch for the applications that you use often.

Note that the 500GB model is 7mm thick, allowing you to use it in ultrabooks, tablets and other devices that require thinner 7mm hard drives.

Fast boot-up times, fast program launch for often used programs and average performance otherwise:

1TB 2.5″ Hard Drive:

2. Western Digital Red 1TB 5400rpm 2.5″ WD10JFCX from
– Amazon
– B&H ($69.87) – Newegg ($74.99)
Slightly higher cost, even more reliable as it is designed for 24/7 usage, comes with a 3 years warranty. Perfect for external enclosures.

About The Author

HR Founder - Computer expert with over 16 years of experience in building, fixing and modifying PCs.
Over the years, I’ve developed a passion for PC hardware and now I enjoy helping others build their own PCs!
In April 2008, I launched Hardware Revolution and ... Read more at my about page

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